Eleven armed robberies met with police crackdown

Andrew Korner
Journalist
Andrew was born and bred in Ipswich and has been at the QT since 2007. After starting out on the country rounds, he moved onto court reporting and then police and emergency services, which he has now been covering for the last three years. When he is not working on police rounds Andrew is busy sifting through the garbage of famous people, in search of ideas for his weekly column, the Naughty Korner. As there are very few famous people in Ipswich, Andrew is often forced to write his column about...

AN alarming spate of armed robberies across the Ipswich district has triggered a police response to match.

In the past five months, detectives from the Ipswich Criminal Investigation Branch have charged 27 people in relation to all 11 armed robbery offences assigned to the unit.

Among the crimes solved was the robbery of the Bundamba Dominos Pizza shop - allegedly commited by six people who also targeted two service stations in Inala on the same night in October last year.

There was also the prolonged investigation into the terrifying home invasion at Pine Mountain in January, where a middle-aged couple was bashed and bound before having weapons and their vehicle stolen.

That investigation ended with the arrest of four men.

Officer in charge of the Ipswich CIB, Detective Senior Sergeant Heath McQueen, said his unit was above the state average in clearing armed and unarmed robbery offences - a statistic he attributed to the tenacity of the detectives and assistance of members of the public in providing good information.

Security footage of an armed robbery in Yamanto in MarchPhoto: ContributedContributed

"Armed robberies are an offence which carry a punishment of life imprisonment and often leave the victims of the offences traumatised for a long time after the offence has occurred," Snr Sgt McQueen said.

"The results we are achieving in solving these robberies is tremendous but ideally it would be better if there were less of these types of offences committed in the first place."

The bad run of robberies across Ipswich came on the back of a near-25% reduction in armed robbery in the area for the 2014-15 financial year - as reported in the QT last October.

While the increase in offences has taken the stats back to a level mirroring the previous year, police have at least managed to keep on top of it.

Snr Sgt McQueen said police were all-too aware of the root cause of the problem.

"In many cases offenders are desperate and often driven by drug addictions or vendettas against persons known to them, but the community can rest assured we are doing everything in our power to ensure they are apprehended and dealt with by the judicial system," he said.